[Merkaartor] v0.12 at a first glance

[Dirk Stöcker]

On Thu, 16 Oct 2008, Boris Cornet wrote:

> Here are my first impressions of v0.12_win. Being unrefined, these may be picky
> and pert, sorry!

I will answer the German language related stuff.

> Cancel & Apply buttons are in english, OK is same in german ;-)

Where exactly? Either translation is missing or it is not marked for 
translation.

> the german translation is excelent, except for just two words: "Keine
> Positionslösung" for 'No Fix' sounds strange to me, how about "Keine Position"
> or "Unzureichende Daten"? And I bet noone understands what "Lösungstyp" is
> supposed to be.

Ok. "Keine Position" is better. Changed "Lösungstyp" to "Positionstyp". 
Not much better, but a little :-) Will be visible in next version.

> I am about to deactivate tag translation, let me explain why: For example
> 'residential'. There is some ambigousity in there even in English. If you
> translate it literally, it would be "Wohnstraße", which is unacapptable because
> both german and austrian law name this term in a completly differnt manner. So
> the translator has choosen "Ortsstraße" which would be 'inner-village-road'. A
> reasonable choice, but ambigousity is at least doubled. I'm slightly afraid that
> translating tags may lead to a "babel syndrom" (all parties have a perfectly
> working symbol set, but none are compatible)

Yes, that is true. But the translations are carefully designed to 
represent actual mapping as well as map features and english meaning 
(which sometimes conflict a lot). The set is the same as used for JOSM, 
which is much larger BTW. The merkaartor subset was easy compared to this.

The question is what you learned first: The english set or the translated 
set. All these who learned the english set may want to stick to it, all 
others will have less problems with a pure German set.

> Whoops! another questionable translation: "Übersetze Standardtypen" -->
> "Vorgabe-Tags übersetzen" (??)

I still have no better wording. Suggestion welcome. "Vorgabe-Tags" is not 
better, sorry.

> Restarted in English, found 'translate standard tags' for "Übersetze
> Standardtypen" (should be OFF by default, IMHO)

We already had that discussion. OFF as default is only acceptable for 
long-time mappers and people who speak English fluently. This may be the 
majority of people here on mailinglist or writing bug-reports, but surely 
not the majority of people using OSM.

That's why the option was introduced. To give these few people the choice.

Ciao
-- 
http://www.dstoecker.eu/ (PGP key available)